Loving parents-Unknown territory..

Today I was thinking about how lucky people are, who are part of a loving and close family..

The type of family you can turn to when something goes terribly wrong. The type of family you know will feel your pain and will offer to help you even if you don’t ask..The type of family that would always put a roof over your head, even if they didn’t have the space or money.

When I am not keeping myself busy, there are these moments of calm where I sit back and imagine how my life could have been if I was lucky enough to have such a family.

As Christmas quickly approaches, my heart aches once again with this deep feeling of sadness.I’ve had this feeling since I was a child.

I know my parents couldn’t have done more due to their NPD, however that doesn’t change that deep longing for comfort in the arms of a loving parent.

My husband unfortunately also shares this feeling with me, although not in exactly the same way. He luckily had a mentally healthy mother who managed to bring him up with integrity, unconditional love and by always putting his needs first. She unfortunately suffered with an autoimmune disease however and was physically suffering when my husband was only a child. His father was not a part of his life so he also never felt this feeling of safety & security. He had to leave home when he was only 12, so his mother’s illness didn’t affect him more than it already had.This was to prevent codependency, which could have been detrimental in his life otherwise. He went to school abroad and lived with 2 separate host families, who sadly weren’t very comforting. He then moved abroad again to live with his half sister, her Dad and his partner in Greece. He managed to finish school there and create some wonderful memories with friends, however nothing seemed to fill that void of ‘missing out’. His mother died when he was in his early twenties and he didn’t have a choice but to just accept it.

Now we are both in our 30’s and we can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have family like this to turn to. Even as a mentally stable adult, people still need their parents. For those of us however who missed out on a nurturing and stable family home, this is all the more challenging. My own mother tells me how she doesn’t know how she would cope if her mother died. My grandmother is 92 and my mother is 63. This feels incredibly unfair to me..How the hell am I supposed to feel, when I am only 34 and my mother has never even felt like a mother?! She is still a child in so many ways and I had to grow up fast from a very young age. I was also the scapegoat in my family with my brother being the golden child. He was the one with the disability and his needs did and will always come first.

As much love as my husband and I share (which I am incredibly grateful for) this doesn’t make up for the lack of belonging we both feel. It is an emptiness that unfortunately doesn’t go away and all we can do is create a family of our own. We have both decided we don’t want to have children, as we feel a deep sadness about the direction the world is headed in. If we don’t feel safe in it as adults, how the hell are we supposed to protect our children?

We will be hopefully getting a dog next year which we are both extremely happy about and we have agreed that if I ever feel the need in the future to look after and care for a child, then we could consider fostering. I have looked after children for over 8 years and still currently caring for a 4 year old here in Germany who only has his mum. This poor kid is already showing signs of abandonment issues due to his father’s lack of interest in him and he is a wonderful little boy with a brilliant, hard working mum. It gives me immense happiness to care for those in need and I will continue to do so, even without children of my own.

I will leave you with this cute photo of the dog breed we will be getting next year 🙂 Hopefully we can find a rescue dog, as that is always the best thing to do.

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6 thoughts on “Loving parents-Unknown territory..”

I can relate to this. The hardest part is knowing that what we desire and have craved our entire lives, will never be. That we can’t have it. The time has passed. I used to daydream a lot about being taken in by a loving family, and would play out my life in these daydreams. It was a happy and content life. But then I’d come back to reality and feel this overwhelming sadness that it’s not real. Thanks for sharing a piece of your heart. xx

I woke up crashing hard today. I have recently now over the past few years after 30 years of living begun to realize that I am an orphan. We can compare ourselves to those who drifted from house to house, and try to claim that somehow our lives were therefore better … But we shouldn’t.

I think in many ways, it is simply at least equally if not worse to be the orphan of the spiritually dead. It is a trauma unrecognized, undetected, uncured, unnurtured, permanent, and the majority of us are never given a second glance or an ounce of respect or compensation about it.

We drift into adulthood misunderstood, alone, empty, writhing in excruciating pain, unstable, blaming ourselves, confused, in cognitive dissonance arguing with ourselves, and feeling ungrateful for what we did not create. We force ourselves to feel grateful for harsh conditions, while we may try to win the hearts of our abusers, and then we force ourselves to look normal believing that we made the problem, and that we can fix it—and nothing that is amiss.

The physically orphaned are given a definitive diagnosis, although they have many of their own challenges—albeit, we most likely share many if not most of the major ones.